A new scientific study has found that tropical trees are not growing more, even as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations hit new highs.Tropical forests absorb as much as 50% of global carbon dioxide emitted each year and are vitally important in fighting climate change. Climate scientists have commonly assumed that as these gases build up, forests will grow at an accelerated rate and absorb more carbon.New research, however, has shown that this assumption may be incorrect.The research, which was published in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience, was conducted by an international team of scientists that analyzed tropical tree ring samples from Bolivia, Cameroon and Thailand. The team found no correlation between increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and forest growth in the past 150 years.While lead scientist Peter van der Sleen, of Wageningen University’s Forest Ecology and Management Group, maintains that forests still remain an important carbon sink, he believes his team’s new research calls into question tropical forests ability to mitigate climate change.New research methodology is responsible for the conclusion, which differs from previous studies. Older studies were based on analyzing biomass material contained in small forest plots, while van der Sleen’s study was based on taking random samples from trees located throughout different forests.His analysis also looked a tree growth over a longer time scale. Van der Sleen believes that if trees were indeed growing more due to higher carbon dioxide levels, their rings would thicken more with time. The trees studied showed no evidence of thicker rings.However, the team did find that increased carbon dioxide exposure did affect trees in two other ways, by contributing to more efficient water absorption and photosynthesis. The team put forth three possibilities for why the trees didn’t show increased ring growth. First, rising temperatures may be inhibiting tree growth. Second, tree growth might be occurring, just in other places like the roots or fruit.A third theory, which the team favors, is that tree growth is limited by other factors not connected to carbon such as nutrients in the soil. Even if individuals trees are not growing more, the number of trees could be increasing as a result of more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This would also have the effect of sequestering some atmospheric carbon. While the team’s research has called into doubt whether forests are compensating for increasing emissions, van der Sleen cautioned that his results are “not conclusive” and urged further study on the subject.

On early Sunday morning, a full thirty-one hours after the UN climate talks in Lima were scheduled to close, the gavel finally dropped. Climate Action Network led their response to the meetings outcome with the line ‘Lima summit shows climate politics lagging behind real world momentum.’ CJN wrote ‘No Justice in Lima Outcome‘. Labor’s presser headline read ‘Lima climate conference deceives, but not the climate movement.’ Government’s signed off on an outcome that neither reflects the growing public support for the ongoing transition from fossil fuels to renewable energies nor the urgency to accelerate this transition.While the Lima Decision reaffirmed that governments have to put the individual climate pledges on table in the first half of next year, forming the foundations of the global climate agreement due in Paris next December, many of the big issues that have plagued the talks for years were shirked and left for later.On finance, governments reached their US $10 billion minimum capitalization goal for the Green Climate Fund. This was a welcome first step, but the momentum provided by the pledges to the Green Climate Fund got lost in translation. The Lima outcome did not provide further clarity about the pathway to the US $100 billion a year promised to support developing countries to take climate action. Finance was essentially kicked down the road to Paris. As a result much of the untapped potential for climate action in developing countries stands in further jeopardy, and faith in the process was undermined for some.Concern over the level of support also complicated governments’ efforts to agree on what kind of information should go into their post-2020 climate action pledges, which are due in the first half of next year. They’ll need to provide information to help the world judge whether the pledges are adequate and equitable. There was an important agreement that no country can backslide from their prior commitments. But governments stepped back from plans for a robust assessment, which could have helped the world measure how each pledge is or is not contributing to a strong Paris agreement.One of Lima’s biggest disconnects on display was the inability of governments to pick any of the low-hanging fruit provided by the recent explosive growth in the renewable energy – growth driven by plummeting prices over the last few years – apparently ignoring the enormous gap between their current commitments and the need to move quickly and strongly. Governments took no meaningful action to scale up climate action in the five years before 2020, the start date for the Paris Agreement. Instead countries are focused only on pledges for action starting after 2020.In a positive contrast, negotiators here in Lima were in sync with the emerging consensus around the world that we need to phase out fossil fuels, illustrated by this phaseout being listed as one of the options in the draft outline for the Paris agreement. Governments acknowledged that they have a May deadline for turning that current list of options for the Paris agreement into a legal negotiating text. This means real work on the Paris agreement must get underway at the next session in February in Geneva.Overall, this COP shows governments are disconnected from their people who are worried about climate risks and want a just transition to boost our economies, deliver jobs and strengthen public health. Increasingly domestic issues, whether they are elections or decisions about major projects such as the Keystone XL pipeline in the US and the Galilee basin in Australia, will be seen as a country’s intention on climate change. While governments were able to hide in Lima, they won’t have that luxury in Paris where the world will be expecting them to deliver an agreement.

Catholic bishops from every continent are urging people to cut their use of fossil fuels and calling for increased efforts from world leaders to secure a climate change treaty. The call coincides with the COP20 UN climate change negotiations taking place this week in Lima, Peru. The statement was released as UN climate negotiations are underway in Peru, marking it as the first senior-lead effort by Catholic bishops worldwide to amplify climate issues.However, despite an overwhelmingly positive atmosphere in Lima, many lament that progress has been slow. The bishops outlined in their statement the importance of “deepening of the discourse at the COP20 in Lima, to ensure concrete decisions are taken at COP21 to overcome the climate challenge and to set us on new sustainable pathways”.

Many suggest that this effort could galvanize the Catholic community—1.2 billion people worldwide—to embrace a move away from fossil fuels and transition towards 100% renewable energy. The hope is that this statement has the potential to make a serious difference in the fight against climate change by reaching Catholics worldwide and engaging them in the movement away from fossil fuels. Catholic bishops are concerned with the environmental effects of fossil fuels, particularly the consequences of carbonization on the world’s most vulnerable groups.The religious leaders are advocating for change to protect communities suffering from the harshest impacts of climate change, such as those living in the Pacific Islands and coastal regions. President of the Peruvian Bishops Conference, Archbishop Monsignor Salvador Piñeiro García-Calderón said:"We bishops from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe have engaged in intense dialogue on the issue of climate change, because we can see it’s the poorest people who are impacted the most, despite the fact they’ve contributed the least to causing it. As the church, we see and feel an obligation for us to protect creation and to challenge the misuse of nature. We felt this joint statement had to come now because Lima is a milestone on the way to Paris, and Paris has to deliver a binding agreement."The Catholic Church continued to hammer its more radical approach to climate action, arguing that nations should aim to keep global temperatures from rising by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, rather than the 2 degree Celsius threshold supported by many UN negotiators.The Bishops went on to assert that a climate treaty would have economic as well as environmental effects: "In viewing objectively the destructive effects of a financial and economic order based on the primacy of the market and profit, which has failed to put the human being and the common good at the heart of the economy, one must recognise the systemic failures of this order and the need for a new financial and economic order."